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Bob Welch

Mother breaks free from a broken legacy

As the January blizzard swept across Crescent Lake Junction a decade ago and with children Rhea, 13, and Jacob, 9, in the car Gienia Baines, 29, wrestled with tire chains for the first time.

She blew on her hands to keep them warm and blinked back tears of frustration. “Men were walking by and just looking at me,” she says. “I was embarrassed.”

But she got her family home to Oakridge, even if the chains were banging the whole way.

It wasn’t the first storm life had blown her way. She was the daughter of an alcoholic mother and a schizophrenic father in Oakridge. She remembers slicing a foot on a broken beer bottle, and her mother refusing to take her to the hospital for fear the state would take her and her three siblings away. “Once, she moved us near Bend and we lived out of our car,” Gienia says. “We ate dog food.”

A brother accidentally hanged himself at 11. She dropped out of school in the ninth grade. Got pregnant at 14, losing the baby at birth. Got pregnant again, and married, at 16. Lost her mother to cancer when Gienia was 19, her father two years later to unknown causes. She got divorced at 21.

Her life was becoming her mother’s life, the life of siblings who would wind up in jail or living under a bridge, chained to addictions. “I had absolutely no love for myself,” she says.

But others did. Birth to Three taught her the parenting basics. Supported her emotionally. Provided clothes for the kids.

A couple of Oakridge churches rallied around her. Head Start offered classes for her pre-school-age children. But, at 21, Baines chucked much of the help. She started drinking heavily. Got pregnant again at 23.

“It took me a good nine months to realize my life sucked,” she says.

In Lane Community College’s Women in Transition program, she finally saw how she was just passing on the family legacy. She reconnected with Head Start. And got involved in Birth to Three’s “Make Parenting a Pleasure” program, an ironic name given that Jacob was, at the time, locking Gienia in her bedroom, ransacking the kitchen and swearing. But like during the blizzard, she found a way to keep the family going.

It has been 10 years since that storm. Gienia is 39. She owns a home. Her daughter, Rhea Cramer, 23, is nearing her master’s degree from the University of Oregon in special education. “Her dedication to us children was phenomenal,” Rhea says. Gienia worked three jobs. “She’d come home from one, then change into her pizza outfit to go to another.”

When a sister of Gienia’s was unable to take care of her three grandchildren, Gienia adopted them. Never mind that she had three of her own, including her youngest, Joshua Troute, who suffers from Asperger syndrome.

Now, much has changed. Rhea sometimes runs into her mother on campus. Gienia, too, is a UO student, studying family and human services. And sometimes meets up for lunch at the EMU with son Jacob, now 20 and a pre-business major with mainly “A” grades.

“I don’t really realize how far I’ve come until I sit down and put it into perspective,” Gienia says.

She’s not angry with her parents. “We were the Brady Bunch compared to what my mother went through,” she says. But she is proud of herself. And her children.

Never more proud, she says, than when hearing about a group of UO students coming home from a ski/snowboard trip to Mount Bachelor last winter and stopping, during a blizzard, not far from where she had a decade ago.

A woman was in tears, trying to put on car chains. The students just walked by and looked at her. Except for one. He got on his knees and put the chains on for her. “I remembered,” Jacob says, “what it had been like for my mom.”